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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23457157">On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages and Genetic Matching</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite'>pallasite</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Behind the Gloves (condensed) [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Babylon 5, Babylon 5 &amp; Related Fandoms, Crusade</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Arranged Marriage, Artificial Insemination, Backstory, Bureaucracy, Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Episode: s02e07 A Race Through Dark Places, Episode: s02e08 Soul Mates, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Genetic Matching, LGBT, Marriage of Convenience, Mention of Off-Screen Canon Sexual Abuse, Please Believe Detailed Canon Facts Over Rogue Telepath Allegations, Psi Corps, Same-Sex Marriage, Worldbuilding, telepaths</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 15:09:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>9,477</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23457157</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>One point of tremendous misunderstanding and confusion in fandom concerns marriage practices in the Corps - arranged marriages/genetic matching especially.</p><p>Here's what happens (and doesn't happen), with lots of canon examples.</p><p>This work is a selection from the <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/series/677654">Behind the Gloves</a> project, with all the mini essays on this topic together in one place.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Behind the Gloves (condensed) [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1687384</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. No One in The Corps Is Forced to Marry or Have Babies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>One point of tremendous misunderstanding and confusion in fandom concerns marriage practices in the Corps, and arranged marriages especially.</p><p>As this topic is long, I am splitting it up into several separate essays.</p><p>Before I dive in, I must first disabuse you of the notion that arranged marriages in the Corps are what you think they are - and as frequent as you think they are. While arranged marriages do take place - among consenting adults - many telepaths do not have arranged marriages, and many do not marry at all. <em>No one in the Corps is ever forced to marry</em>.</p><p>There are five recurring telepath characters in the show, including Crusade.</p>
<ul>
<li>Lyta Alexander: Raised in the Corps, in the same elite Cadre Prime as Bester. At the time of the pilot, she's thirty one by normal age reckoning (thirty-two in telepath reckoning). <strong><em>Never married. No children.</em></strong>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Talia Winters: Raised in the Corps. At the time of the pilot, she's twenty six by normal age reckoning. <strong><em>Possibly had an arranged marriage - canon is unclear (and the only source here is the problematic episode "Soul Mates"). She and her husband did know each other, and were close, when the topic of marriage came up. Annulled. Never remarried. No children.</em></strong>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Byron Gordon: Raised as a normal (inference). Age not specified, but he's somewhere in his 30s. <strong><em>Never married. No children.</em></strong>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>John Matheson: Raised as a normal. Age not specified, but he's in his 30s at the time of Crusade. <strong><em>Never married. No children.</em></strong>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Al Bester: Raised in the Corps, in the elite Cadre Prime. At the time of the pilot, he's sixty-seven years old by normal age reckoning. He got engaged to his first girlfriend at nineteen, but they never married (Long Story). When he was about thirty-three, and struggling emotionally, the Corps suggested a possible marriage to Alisha Ross, then twenty-four. (Bester's colleague says of her, when raising the subject: "She agreed, in principle, to consider a match.") <em><strong>They met, liked each other, and after a short courtship, chose to marry</strong></em> - but within a year, he caught her cheating on him with her ex-boyfriend, and she and Bester separated. Though publicly they say her son is his, he is not. He and Alisha, though legally still married at the time of the pilot, have had no contact since 2223 - <strong><em>thirty-three years</em></strong>. Neither sought to marry anyone else.</li>
</ul><p>That's two out of five.<em> And no one was ever forced to marry.</em></p><p>The larger issue is that for reasons I will detail in another essay, the Corps often <strong><em>prohibits</em></strong> people who want to marry from doing so. The show never tells you about that.</p><p>Arranged marriages are <em>suggestions</em>: If two people are close, and would also be close genetic matches, the Corps might suggest they consider marriage. (This is what happened to Talia. After their marriage, he turned out to be emotionally abusive, and she quickly got out.) The Corps also looks after telepaths and their well-being - if the Corps sees someone is lonely or could benefit from the emotional support of a spouse, they might suggest that person meet potential partners they've selected. (This is what happened to Bester. Sadly, Alisha was unfaithful - and though she subsequently swore to leave her lover and stay with him, he wanted out.)</p><p>And before you all start asking me about "genetic breeding," guess how many of the five recurring telepath characters have children that are genetically theirs?</p><p>
  <strong>NONE.</strong>
</p><p>And that includes two Psi Cops, and at least three telepaths raised in the Corps.</p><p>(Bester came the closest - he was lovers with Carolyn, a telepath who <em>wasn't in the Corps</em>. At the time of her death, she was pregnant with his child.)</p><p>So: "The Corps breeds you like puppies?"</p><p>
  <strong>Oh, sure they do! That's why none of these supposedly representative telepaths have children, even through IVF!</strong>
</p><p>The truth is that dating, courtship and marriage practices are <em>different</em> in the Corps than among normals, and I will get into all that, but that doesn't make it <em>bad</em> (even if we meet two telepaths whose marriages didn't work out... along with some normals whose relationships <em>also</em> didn't work out).</p><p>Canon's presentation of life in the Corps as being "forced marriages and forced breeding" is <strong>false</strong>.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Why Does the Corps Genetically Match People?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>What's this genetic matching business, anyway?</p><p>I will get into this in more detail later (and actually already have, in <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/11991930/chapters/27130080">Natasha Alexander's story</a>), but I'm going to back up.</p><p>Putting aside the allegations in <em>A Race Through Dark Places</em> (because those allegations deserve their own detailed response), canon's not lying to you when it says that the Corps sometimes suggests marriage (or having a baby artificially) to telepaths who are deemed to be close genetic matches.</p><p>What they never tell you is <em>why.</em></p><p>There are many canon errors about the Corps in Peter David's episode <em>Soul Mates</em>. As I said at the bottom of <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/10553654">this post</a> about Department Sigma, Peter David, though an author I greatly love, missed the mark with this episode and made up some stuff that is totally inconsistent with the rest of canon. As I heard the story (in part from him), the episode went through many rewrites, with JMS tossing it back in his face each time, and it almost wasn't approved by JMS (primarily for structural reasons) till Harlan Ellison got involved and Peter David finally brought the structure more in line. I take the position in <em>Behind the Gloves</em> that on some key issues, especially relating to the Corps, Peter David just didn't have a deep understanding the world in which he was writing.</p><p>Nonetheless, this is one of the few times marriage in the Corps is discussed in canon, so let's look at that snippet.</p><p>Talia: "In your first year of training in Psi Corps Academy you're assigned to an advanced trainee who oversees your development."</p><p>[The Academy is actually high school, though he seems to mean a college-age program. That, for Talia, would be her training as a commercial or court telepath (she has both). There's no other reference in canon to such pairing up in that age group or in these kinds of programs, but maybe there was in Talia's particular program, I don't know.]</p><p>Talia: "Matt was mine. He was charming, sympathetic. Understand, the things I learned to do for Psi Corps were, and are, difficult."</p><p>[There is no explanation of what these things were, or why they were difficult. She was training to be a commercial telepath, which isn't especially challenging a job - you mostly sit there as a potted plant and die of boredom as normals conduct their business around you. She wasn't training to be a Psi Cop or bloodhound - she's just a P5. The only difficult thing Talia's mentioned being involved with was doing before and after scans on prisoners sentenced to death of personality... and that wouldn't be first year training, I don't think!]</p><p>Talia: "Matt made the transition easier, at first. Then the Corps decided that we were genetically compatible. The odds of us producing a child of great telepathic abilities were substantial. It all happened so fast."</p><p>Ivanova, I think: "How long were you married?"</p><p>Talia: "Just long enough to realize it was a mistake."</p><p>-----</p><p>OK, so they were close - they worked closely together and they were friends. Sometimes one person puts in the request and asks the Corps for a compatibility check (as Bester did with his first finacee, before proposing to her), and sometimes the Corps (here, via the teachers at the school) goes, "Hey! These two young people seem to like each other, and the odds of them having a child who is telepathically stronger are pretty good, so let's suggest marriage to them." It's a <em>suggestion</em>. People can say no. And if they marry and it was a mistake, they can separate, divorce or get an annulment like anyone else can.</p><p>But the show never answers the crucial question - <strong><em>why does the Corps care about genetic compatibility, anyway?</em></strong></p><p>By leaving this out of the show as a whole, canon is deceiving you. They want you to think this must be some nefarious eugenics plot to breed a master race (and take over the world!). Or maybe that the Corps is being fascist, abusive and infantilizing of telepaths FOR LOLZ. They want you to think they look at their own people like some kind of breeding stock, like telepaths all live in a giant Telepath Puppy Mill. (TM.)</p><p>What's actually going on is entirely different, even if most telepaths don't know the history and the reasons - Kevin Vacit, once the director of the Corps, had received messages from Vorlons. He knew the Shadows were one day going to come and try to take over the world (and kill everyone). He knew that telepaths were necessary to stop this threat. <em>And he knew that there were far fewer telepaths alive than should have been, because of a long history of normals massacring, one-on-one murdering, and aborting telepaths.</em></p><p>Too few telepaths + telepaths aren't strong enough + Shadows = everyone's dead. Including that 99.9% non-telepath population.</p><p>Not all telepaths carry the genetic marker for telepathy, because it's more complicated than that, but whatever the causes, it's recessive. Beyond that, I don't know the genetics, but Vacit helped created a bureaucratic system whereby telepaths who are not likely to produce children of equal or greater telepathic strength may be <em>prohibited</em> from marrying, and telepaths who are likely to produce children of equal or greater strength would be permitted to marry if they request it, and to whom marriage (or IVF without marriage) may be <em>suggested</em>, if they are amenable to it. (Here, Talia and Matt were already friends.)</p><p>This is not a puppy mill. The relevant comments in Jenny's diary are <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/10867419">the rantings of a brainwashed thirteen-year-old girl</a> who has never lived a minute in the Corps or even met someone in the Corps. (I'm a little shocked that fandom takes her and the Dexters as reliable sources of information here!)</p><p>Back to the show itself, and <em>Soul Mates</em>, Talia wouldn't know this backstory about the Shadow threat - she would just know that this is how her people do things, and have done things for generations (at least a hundred years). Most telepaths would just see it as part of tradition, a way to keep their people strong and make them stronger. Some (especially laters) might resent it. OK. But you all do realize that some form of arranged marriage has been the norm in human history since time immemorial, right? That marriages <em>not</em> being suggested or arranged by one's family is the aberration, right?</p><p>Yes, some laters resent it. It's not their culture. But the viewers need to know what's going on - what happens and what doesn't happen - and the reasons for it.</p><p>Big picture? To help protect Earth from future Shadow invasion.</p><p>Small picture? Tradition. Culture. An insular, tight-knit community. Keeping our family healthy and strong.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. But That Rogue Telepath in "A Race Through Dark Places"...!</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Moving this section up, because you all want to know.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In <em>A Race Through Dark Places</em>, Talia has been kidnapped by rogue telepaths. One of them has the following dialogue with her:</p><p>Rogue telepath: My talent woke up when I hit puberty. The Corps took me in, said I was a P11, as high as you can go before they turn you into a Psi Cop. After two years, they picked another P11 and said I had to marry him. They wanted to increase the odds of breeding a P12 or higher. I refused. One night, I woke up, heard voices, something soft over my face. Felt hands lifting me out of bed. The next morning, they tried to tell me it was all just a dream. Four weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant.</p><p>Talia: Oh, my God.</p><p>Rogue telepath: When she was born, they took her from me. As soon as I could walk, I escaped from the hospital. I never saw my baby again. Maybe the Corps served a function a long time ago. Now it's something else. I know it. You know it. We can't let it go on this way.</p><p>True or False?</p><p>
  <strong>Mostly False.</strong>
</p><p>First, for the one piece that is true: All children born in the Corps are raised by the Corps. In most cases, children enter the Corps between ages three and five (when they join their cadres), but when teenagers come into the Corps pregnant (it happens), or get pregnant while in school (despite sexual relations among students not being permitted, it happens), the babies are raised in the creche along with all other babies born to teenage mothers in the Corps, who are orphaned as infants (e.g. Bester), or whose parents are unable to care for them.</p><p>She also never saw her baby again because <em>she ran away</em>. Of course she would have been allowed to see her child had she stayed. Also, according to this story, she was thirteen or fourteen when she had the baby. She expected to raise the baby herself, while effectively in <em>middle school</em>?</p><p>Now, for the rest of this mess.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Corps does not arrange marriages for thirteen-year-olds.</strong></li>
</ul><p>If she said the Corps asked her to marry someone when she was nineteen or twenty, this piece would be believable. The Corps <em>does</em> sometimes <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550252">recommend marriage</a> to <em>adults</em>, such as Al Bester and Talia Winters (but not Lyta Alexander, Byron Gordon, John Matheson, or many others). But this girl wasn't an adult (even if, as I recall, the actress who portrayed her on screen seems older) - she says the Corps tried marry her off <em>two years after she reached puberty</em>. Students in the Corps are not even permitted to have consensual sexual relations with classmates <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/14551104">at the age of eighteen</a> - the Corps does not marry off thirteen-year-olds.</p><p>Furthermore, I don't even believe that Earth Alliance law would allow anyone to marry so young, telepath or not. The Corps doesn't marry or divorce anyone - all marriages, whether normals or telepaths, go through the Earth Alliance civil system/courts. The Corps can't force anyone to marry, and certainly not someone who is legally too young to marry in the first place.</p><p>("But wait!" someone's going to say. "What if someone thought the Shadows were coming Any Day Now and wanted to try to increase the telepath population before then?" ...You do realize that only 5% of telepaths develop their abilities before puberty, right? So we're still talking about another 12-20 years before this child develops telepathy, right? So, no. This also makes no sense. Nor would the Corps' response to "the Shadows are showing up any day now" be "quick, we have have sexually abuse children!" <span class="small">I can't believe I even have to say this.</span>)</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Corps doesn't force-impregnate anyone - not adults, and certainly not children.</strong></li>
</ul><p>This is why I just wrote that <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/14555994">whole essay</a> on artificial insemination in the Corps - what happens and what doesn't happen.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>If any of this did happen to her, and the teachers wanted her to believe it had just been "a dream," why did they let her remember it in the first place?</strong></li>
</ul><p>If there really had been some Evil Plot among the school teachers and staff to abduct and force-impregnate this girl, and they didn't want her to know about it, they would have erased her memory of it. <em>That's not hard to do</em>.</p><p>So, what happened? How does a thirteen-year-old girl get pregnant in school, and come to believe this has happened to her?</p><p>Sadly, the simplest explanation is that she was raped by someone, either an older student or a staff member, and that person was strong enough telepathically to alter her memories and make her believe the teachers and staff had done this to her, so she wouldn't tell. Sometimes, sexual assaults do happen in boarding schools, either run by normals or by telepaths. <strong>If someone's looking to cherry-pick horror stories, then across the whole EA, with ten million telepaths</strong> - most of whom are in the Corps - a story can be found where someone was raped in school.</p><p>And perpetrators will do anything not to be caught - in this case, possibly even alter the girl's memory. (Why he would have come up with this story, and not just erase her memory of the event, makes no sense to me, but this is my best guess as to what could have happened, given the little we know.)</p><p>The girl goes to the teachers, who genuinely don't know anything about it, and who tell her it was just a dream. They tell her that it didn't happen because <em>it didn't happen</em>.</p><p>When the teachers later discovered she was pregnant, though, they would investigate. A thirteen-year-old girl has become pregnant in their school, and there is evidence that her memories were altered? It sure looks like something criminal and horrible has happened. There's no explanation given why they didn't investigate (the episode's point is just to drop the most horrific allegation possible, while explaining nothing) - maybe the teachers did investigate and she doesn't know about it, maybe she doesn't believe they were really investigating, etc. (A paternity test on the child would resolve the question of who had abused her, but as she says, she'd run away by that point.) All we hear is a few lines from her point of view, filtered through the author's agenda to vilify the Corps and make the viewers believe they systematically sexually abuse children.</p><p>Could this one girl have been raped in school? Yes. Telepath criminals exist (not just rogues) - that's why Psi Cops exist. That doesn't make such abuse commonplace, however - it could still be quite rare - and it certainly doesn't make it <em>actual Corps policy</em> to do this to children, which is the implication here, since this girl then goes on to say the entire Corps should be abolished based on what these particular school staff members allegedly did to her. She is not calling for an investigation into what occurred in that school - she has run away in Franklin's pipeline to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827937">actual slavery</a>, and she's claiming that the entire Corps, though it once may have "served a function" "a long time ago," now needs to be abolished. And that naturally, Talia "knows this," too.</p><p>(And then because this is the <em>author's</em> point, to justify the "moral position" of his good guys in this episode and in later episodes, Talia agrees with the rogue telepaths by the end (Ivanova was right! I've been a victim of the Corps, too, all along!), and thus establishes her status as the show's token "good" (and "woke") telepath character.)</p><p>It's as thin as plastic wrap and just as transparent.</p><p>The real tragedy is that of this poor girl, who is going from sexual and telepathic abuse by someone at school, to what she's facing in "the outer colonies" (more of the same, and maybe worse).</p><p>-----</p><p>Post script: If she's a P11, the man who assaulted her is likely a P12, possibly himself a Psi Cop. We also don't know her memories were altered just once - he may have erased her memory after the rape, then rearranged her memories a second time when he found out she was pregnant. Whatever happened, we're talking about some <em>serious crimes</em>, and can only hope he's been found out by paternity test and tossed in the darkest dungeon the Corps can find ("Let's just say I put him in a hole and threw away the hole"). But however bad this one "bad apple" is, this doesn't remotely justify or even <em>rationally relate to</em> the girl's so-called point, that "the Corps has become corrupt, has outlived whatever purpose it once may have served, and should be abolished."</p><p>This girl needs a history lesson, and not one written by the Dexters.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. How Did Telepath Arranged Marriages Begin?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dark Genesis mentions on p. 117-118 that Lyta's great-grandmother, Shell Alexander, had an arranged marriage.</p><p>          Shell Alexander flashed him a smile as he entered the room. She was placing his suits in a hanging bag. As with Kevin, he was stunned by a moment of déja vu. It could have been Blood standing there.</p><p>          But Shell was not Blood, and on second glance didn't even look much like her. Her thick tresses were brown rather than midnight, her skin pale. Her eyebrows flirted with being red, and her chin was longer and narrower than her grandmother's, tapered. No, Shell resembled Blood in much less tangible ways. The set of her stance, the flicker in her eyes, the way her hands moved. Like many in the "kith" of the Authority, she had kept her grandmother's name, as well. Mitochondrial descent, they called it.</p><p>          "Hi, Uncle Lee."</p><p>          "Afternoon, Shell. I'm sorry to have to ruin your day like this. I know it's goin' to be a terrible thing to have to see your fiancé back in Geneva."</p><p>          She shrugged. "He's okay. They certainly could have picked someone worse for me to marry."</p><p>          "I thought you fancied him. Michelle, just say the words, and I'll-"</p><p>          "Hush, Uncle Lee. No. I don't want special treatment. My grandmother wouldn't have wanted that, nor my mother. I'm her daughter, and I'll set a good example."</p><p>          Lee patted her shoulder. "You're a fine woman, Shell. A credit to your mother and her mother. You should be proud to bear their name."</p><p>          "I am," Shell replied. "Now. Do you want all of these suits, or just-"</p><p>          She was cut off by an inarticulate yell from below. For an instant, Lee felt his blood freeze. There hadn't been an attempt on his life in years, but-</p><p>          "No, it's okay," Shell said. "It's just Kevin. He's excited about something. I can't..." She trailed off as Kevin burst into view. He was grinning like a cat, something Kevin rarely did.</p><p>          "Senator, you better get downstairs. You aren't going to believe it. You really aren't."</p><p>Then the Centauri show up, and that's the last we hear about Shell Alexander, her marriage, or arranged marriages in this time period.</p><p>Shell Alexander is supposedly a very "elite" telepath in the MRA, given her lineage. But she seems like not more than a domestic servant to old "uncle" Southern Lee Crawford - bringing him his dry cleaning, and consenting to a marriage to a man who "could be worse" because she doesn't want any "special treatment." And her attitude is presented as a "good example" for other telepaths - agreeing to marry someone she doesn't love in order to set a "good example" to other telepaths. (Since this is the only example of an arranged marriage in this time period, we have to guess how much freedom other telepaths in the Authority had to get out of arranged marriages. Even though Crawford is offering her a chance out with no fuss, she refuses his offer, because she feels it would set a bad example for other telepaths if she took advantage of her (relative) privilege as pet teep to Crawford to get easily out of an arrangement it may be more difficult for others to get out of. Even if others could also get out of bad arrangements, the Authority is trying to push that these arrangements are "proper" behavior for telepaths, so if she broke it off, just because she wasn't deeply in love with the guy, it would send the "wrong" message in the Authority (predecessor to the Corps).)</p><p>Since this scene takes place before Vacit takes over as director (this clip happens shortly before the Corps was formed), the arranged marriages have nothing to do with Vorlons and Shadows. They're not explained. Why do arranged marriages exist at all for telepaths in this time period, even if the practice is still relatively uncommon (as Vacit says later)? Was this part of Crawford's larger plan to control telepaths and make them into a subservient caste? Probably. Hence Shell's duties as one of Crawford's personal telepaths... to bring him his dry cleaning. And we also see this attitude in her choice to uphold the appearance of Crawford's policies being "good" for telepaths over her own personal happiness in a marriage. ("They certainly could have picked someone worse for me to marry.")</p><p>I take from this scene that the arranged marriages, like so many other later Corps policies, actually began as just another way for normals to control telepaths. (Not for telepaths to "oppress each other.") Telepaths subverted it, and made it work for them.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. How (And Why) Did Telepath Arranged Marriages Change Over the Years?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dark Genesis, p. 217-218:</p><p>"When I touched the artifacts from Mars, I came to understand something else. Something truly profound. There are beings out there in the cosmos, Ms. Alexander, beside whom even the Centauri look like cavemen. Some, I'm certain, are benevolent - those who made the artifacts on Mars, for instance. At least so it seems. But I also have the impression - no, the certainty - that there are others, who could and would destroy our race with no more thought or effort than you and I would expend to kill a bug on our kitchen floor.</p><p>"When we meet those beings, we will need every weapon we can get our hands on, and among those weapons I include ourselves. We will need the most powerful teeps we can find - more powerful than any we presently have, I think. P14s, P30s, if such a thing is possible. And stable telekinetics." He heaved a sigh. "I can't even tell you why I think that, exactly, and for some reason it angers me when I examine it closely. But I am certain."</p><p>"So the arranged marriages were your idea. To prepare us to fight these aliens, if they truly exist?"</p><p>"Oh, they exist. But no, the genetic matching was already in place when I started working for Crawford. I encouraged it."</p><p>-----</p><p>I expand on that scene in the third chapter of <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/11991930/chapters/27188667">Natasha Alexander's fic</a>, placing that conversation more appropriately <em>after</em> the upcoming meeting with the Vorlon on Venus, and explaining a few missing pieces in canon. Chief among these missing pieces is the central <em>why</em>: The Corps needs to take these extreme measures to defend humanity from the Shadows because of all those massacres, murders and abortions that happened in 2115, 2156, and every other year across the Earth Alliance. Canon shows these events happening at the beginning of the book, it mentions them again in the middle, it mentions them again at the end of Final Reckoning... but somehow never mentions that this is <em>why</em> all these desperate measures were necessary. (They gave you all the spokes of the "wheel," but without the central fact that holds them all together, and shows this to be <em>a wheel</em>.)</p><p>So that was Vacit's motivation.</p><p>To that end, he set up a massive bureaucracy inside the Corps to track the genealogy of all telepaths (through DNA testing at birth), to develop algorithms for predicting the best genetic matches to produce children who are stronger telepathically than their parents, and to screen all telepath marriage applications, across the entire EA, by these criteria. (With the exception of same-sex marriage applications... that's a subject for another essay!)</p><p>As I explained before, and will explain in more detail later, the Corps does not force anyone to get married or to have a baby, but they do <em>suggest</em>.</p><p>
  <strong>And the suggestions don't come from the Corps in the sense that you get some letter in the mail saying "we want you to marry this person!", but from your own teachers, supervisors etc., who know both you and the other person, and who think you'd make a good match. The Corps bureaucracy just has to approve it.</strong>
</p><p>In the Corps, this genealogy/matching department has a lot of power. They can say "no" to a marriage. (They usually deny marriages because according to their algorithms, any future children would have statistically low odds of being telepathically of equal or greater strength than the parents, but there can be other reasons, too - such as if they realize that the applicants are actually siblings who didn't know about each other. Given the way children are raised in the Corps, how common IVF is, and how often paternity is lied about, I think this might happen in the Corps more often than people realize. "Sorry, she's your sister.")</p><p>This genealogy department does, indirectly, have a lot of power over people's lives. (And if you're the director, you can even make someone "appear out of thin air"!)</p><p>Garibaldi to Derrick Thompson, a telepath who has the misfortune of having to work with him during the hunt for Bester after the war:</p><p>          Thompson: "Could he have family here?"</p><p>          Garibaldi: "Family? You know better than that. Bester wasn't just raised by the Corps, they gave <em>birth</em> to him. There are absolutely no records linking him to any other human being."</p><p>          Thompson: "I noticed that. That's weird, even for the old Psi Corps. Keeping track of genealogies, notably for breeding purposes, was everything, especially back then."</p><p>(Garibaldi then goes on to make some bigoted remarks about telepaths.)</p><p>And elsewhere in the canon books, Garibaldi voices objections both to telepaths marrying normals (which places him in agreement of 90% of normals in that time period), but also to <em>telepaths marrying each other</em> (because he's such a bigot, he believes that telepaths marrying each other and having children is "breeding a superior race" that will Take Over The World). He'd really rather telepaths just all "disappeared," one way or the other (violently if necessary, even if he wouldn't say that to a telepath's face).</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Who Makes Arranged Marriages for Telepaths?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So who makes these marriage suggestions?</p><p>As I've said elsewhere, "the Corps is Mother and Father" doesn't mean "Big Bother is Watching You," but that all telepaths are a close-knit <em>family</em>. As telepaths say in the pledge, "we are all children of the Corps," but telepaths who are older and in positions of authority also act in a parental role to the young.</p><p>Teachers raise children. Psi Cops keep the peace. And elders look after younger members of the family, and sometimes suggest marriages.</p><p>No one gets some letter from up in Geneva saying "we've matched you with this random person." Telepath communities are very small, insular, and tight-knit. Generally, in a given city, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone else's business. (It's pretty damn hard to keep a secret in that community.) Elders in the community (teachers, supervisors, older people) will look at the younger, unmarried people and say, "ah, these two would make a good match!" and then ask the Corps if there's a genetic match as well. If there is, then they will recommend to those two young people, "Hey! Why don't you consider marriage?"</p><p>In Talia's case, this happened off-screen, but it can be inferred that her teachers saw that she and Matt were friends, asked the Corps about their genetic compatibility, and suggested marriage. They married quickly, which turned out to be a mistake. He became emotionally abusive to her. She got out. Then she started up a relationship with Jason Ironheart, her instructor. Talia was a P5, and Ironheart a P10, so even if they'd applied to marry, it's not clear this would have been approved. But they never applied for marriage, at least not that we know of. He volunteered for an experiment with Department Sigma, and left the Academy.</p><p>In Bester's case, the suggestion came from his supervisor, Assistant Director Babineau.</p><p>-----</p><p>Deadly Relations, p. 176-177</p><p>          Al wasn't particularly surprised when Assistant Director Babineau called him into his office a few weeks later. If he had been both observant and honest with himself, he would never have doubted Erik's word. But over the years, Al had gained the knack of ignoring - no, not ignoring, but disregarding - the opinions of those around him when they concerned him. When he worried about what people thought of him, it invariably led to grief. He sought excellence, and that rubbed people the wrong way - people didn't want you to be excellent, they wanted you to be mediocre, to keep expectations low, and make life easier for them.</p><p>          This time, though, he should have been paying attention. The Corps could tolerate a lot in an officer if he was efficient - but it could not tolerate instability.</p><p>          He half expected that Babineau was going to announce a hearing to determine his fitness to serve. In his mind, he was already preparing his defense.</p><p>          But for today, at least, it was just Babineau, his diminutive form doll-like behind an overlarge desk.</p><p>          "Ah. Mr. Bester. If you would?" He gestured to a chair, which Al stiffly accommodated to.</p><p>          "Mr. Bester, I am a plainspoken man, and a busy one, so I'll come to the point, if you don't mind. Do you know Alisha Ross?"</p><p>          "Sir? Yes, sir, we've met."</p><p>          "What do you think of her?"</p><p>          "Think of her, sir?"</p><p>          "Did you find her attractive? Ugly? Interesting? Boring? Flaky?"</p><p>          "She is not unattractive, sir. I can't say whether I find her interesting or not - we've never really spoken, and I know very little about her."</p><p>          "Well, I'll tell you a bit. She's a P12, like yourself. Doesn't have the temperament for fieldwork, so she mostly does forensics, building psychological profiles, that sort of thing. She's a decent soccer player, twenty-four years old, single. Do I have to draw you a picture, Mr. Bester?"</p><p>          "I see," Al said, feeling more than a little disoriented. "She and I - we have a good genetic match?"</p><p>          "Very good. Mr. Bester, we've already spoken to Ms. Ross. She's agreed, in principle, to consider a match."</p><p>          "And you want me to..."</p><p>          "First you should meet, I should think. Talk about it. But quite honestly, Mr. Bester, there are many who think marriage would be good for you at this time. If it isn't hate at first sight, the Corps is much in favor of a union between you and Ms. Ross. Such thorough genetic compatibility is actually quite rare."</p><p>          "Yes, sir. I would be happy to meet Ms. Ross."</p><p>          "You're a credit to the Corps, Mr. Bester. I expected nothing less from you."</p><p>-----</p><p>As background to this, Bester has been mentally unstable since the Black Fox Raid. He endured such trauma that he psychosomatically lost use of his left hand, but refused to consent to a recommended psychiatric scan that could help find and resolve the issue. He's been volunteering for deathbed scans, risking his life each time, and leaving him in seemingly worse emotional shape each time. He's been suffering from flashbacks, nightmares, and insomnia. The mental health evaluators in the Corps have been asking his friends and colleagues about him. And yes, while they're worried about him as an <em>officer</em>, they are also worried about him as a <em>person, </em>and in Erik's case, as a <em>friend</em>, something he can't understand because 1. he's a loner by personality anyway, and 2. trauma. People with PTSD have a lot of trouble trusting others.</p><p>So the elders around him - in this case, <em>an assistant director</em> - suggested a marriage, to help his mental health. Alisha, though recently having been in relationship herself, may not have been permitted to marry her lover (they are lower genetic matches). Either way, she respects and even admires Bester as a person, and so she agrees to marry him. Not out of "pity," as he interprets it, but to help him and to help the Corps. (And then she's unfaithful and messes this all up. She should have been more honest with herself and the Corps before agreeing to this, that even though she <em>wanted</em> to help, she wasn't the right person for this. But she lied to herself about her feelings for Jared. She also lied to Bester when she told him she wasn't in love with anyone else - Bester at least told her that he'd once been in love with someone else, long ago, in his youth. But that had been when he was eighteen, nineteen by telepath age reckoning - <em>fourteen years prior</em> - while she and Jared had been lovers recently.)</p><p>Babineau didn't know Alisha would be unfaithful. She seemed genuinely committed to it. (She lied to everyone, including herself, genuinely believing that her feelings for Jared didn't matter if the Corps found a good match for her.)</p><p>The point is, the people around Bester suggested the marriage because <em>they cared</em>, even though Bester couldn't emotionally understand it through his trauma. Natasha Alexander went to bat for him, soon after his injury. She cut him slack no one else would, because she knew Director Vacit had been especially fond of him for some reason. Bester's friend Erik went to bat for him, to try to keep him in his job and out of a psychiatric treatment facility. (Erik went to great lengths for him, even though he pushed Erik away - this is itself a long story that <em>Behind the Gloves</em> comes back to later.) Assistant Director Babineau didn't want to pull his badge, either, not just because Bester was an excellent Psi Cop, but because <em>he cared</em>.</p><p>All of this is in there, but it's easy to miss since the story is from Bester's point of view, and he's Pushing Everyone Away. And then Alisha cheats on him and he pushes her away, too, and doesn't have any other relationships until he meets Caroline <em>thirty-five years later</em>.</p><p>I've said it before, and I'll say it again - by telling the story from Bester's point of view, and offering readers no other insight into life in the Corps, the book <em>seriously</em> skews the presentation of telepath culture. It's highly cooperative, very tightly-knit, and very insular. Yes, people stick their noses into "each other's" business (by normal cultural standards), which can be a huge point of culture shock to laters, and to outsiders trying to understand it, but it also means that <em>people look out for each other</em>. Telepaths treat each other as a close-knit family, and if someone needs something, the people around them try to provide it. (Bester is <em>grateful</em> to the Corps for seeing what he needed - a wife - and providing that, at least till Alisha messes it all up by behaving <em>selfishly</em>.)</p><p>Elders and those with authority in the Corps look after younger people, as well as after the Corps as a whole. Bester just personally has a lot of trouble fitting into that system, socially, because he's such a loner, and always has been, since he was a small child. (He's making life hard for people not because he's striving for excellence over mediocrity, but because, as he says himself, he disregards what other people think of him. "I don't give a shit what people think of me, I just want to be the best" is <em>not</em> Corps values. They're tolerating his attitude because he's good at his job. And even though he sometimes treats the people around him like crap, <em>they still care</em>. Telepaths are a family.)</p><p>Arranged marriages, even the genetic matching piece, are part of the same tight-knit familial culture. They're <em>suggestions</em>. Like all marriages (and other relationships), they sometimes work out, and sometimes don't.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Courting and Dating in the Corps</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Now that we've talked a little bit about what arranged marriages are and are not, let's talk about courtship!</p><p>Sometimes courtship is really short, and times it's longer. Talia's courtship to Matt was very short. Bester's courtship to Alisha Ross was also very short. (The Black Fox Raid was after April 2222, and they married in April of the following year. I think they courted for a month or two. They agreed on the first date that they were on the same page regarding marriage, and as I remember it, they married after three more dates. Honestly, it was more small talk and wedding plans over dinner than it was "dating.")</p><p>But not all relationships in the Corps are like that. Telepaths also have passionate love affairs. Bester's relationship with his first girlfriend was entirely different.</p><p><em>Behind the Gloves</em> gets into all that more later - at this point I want to talk about dating in school.</p>
<ul>
<li>Students in the Corps are not allowed to have physical relationships with other students until they graduate - <em>at age eighteen, nineteen by telepath age reckoning</em>. Some older students do anyway, but if they're caught, they're punished.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>And I'm not just talking about sex - touching each other without gloves is super immodest! Students caught engaging in immodest conduct, especially an actual sexual relationship, are denied privileges (such as the right to leave campus), forbidden to associate with each other, or punished in other ways.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The Corps is very big on modesty and boundaries - telepaths don't touch each other barehanded unless they're immediate family, or intimate. (Final Reckoning, p. 68: "He actually felt a blush coming on [when Louise grabbed his hand]. In the Corps, you always wore gloves, except when you were alone - or intimate.") There's that old joke in the Corps about why the boys try to peek into the girls' showers? (To see them wash their hands.)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Students in the Major Academy can ask the Corps if they are matches with their sweethearts, and they are permitted to marry when they graduate, but they are not permitted to have such relationships in school.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>If boys and girls visit each other's rooms, it must be before curfew, the door must be open, and <em>gloves must be on</em>. Even when students are eighteen, and would be legal adults in the normal world, they must still follow these school rules.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Some teachers are more lenient with older students, as long as the students keep it discreet, but other teachers aren't. It depends on the teacher and the school.</li>
</ul><p>At Bester's school in Geneva (the flagship school), they're on the lenient side (at least for the oldest students). Still, let's be clear - Bester has gotten involved with probably the most rule-breaking "bad girl" among the laters. (For one of many examples, see Dark Genesis, p. 118, when she arrives to class late: "Montoya was a capricious creature, always flirting, usually outrageous, rarely more than a single word from being thrown out of class.")</p><p>Yes, they're on the "lenient side", but still, he's literally <em>climbing in the window</em>.</p><p>-----</p><p>Deadly Relations, p. 136:</p><p>          A week before finals, he met with her for lunch, and she asked him to meet her in her room that night.</p><p>          He went, a little after nine. Liaisons like this were ambiguous territory - essentially everyone knew that students went to each other's rooms, and ostensibly it was forbidden. As long as you were careful, as long as appearances were maintained, no one really cared. Like a good parent, the Corps knew that sometimes it was best to be a little blind in one eye.</p><p>          So sneaking in was just a ritual, though there were penalties for being caught. He might be forbidden to associate with Liz for a time; leave, always difficult to get, might be entirely restricted.</p><p>          Al liked the window. It was traditional, and gave him a chance to hone his climbing skills.</p><p>-----</p><p>They're both future Psi Cops and this is less than a month from graduation (and on top of that, they are high genetic matches - Bester checked before he proposed marriage to her), so they're not going to get thrown out for it, but still... <em>he's sneaking in a window</em>. (I think someone would probably see that at a little after nine, but OK.)</p><p>My point is that whatever leniency some teachers might have for students who are eighteen or nineteen, students are on paper actually forbidden from having these relationships - they are <em>not</em> being matched up by the Corps with arranged marriages while in school. That wouldn't happen until students are older, either in their post-Academy training, or long out of training (in their twenties or thirties).</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Artificial Insemination Is More Common, Actually</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the Corps, people of all sexual orientations do this kind of thing <em>all the time</em>. Every day. It's <em>very, very</em> common: <strong>more common, actually, than arranged marriage.</strong></p><p>Deadly Relations, p. 185:</p><p>          Bester, after he's caught his wife cheating: "Why did you marry me?"</p><p>          Alisha: "You know why."</p><p>          Bester: "No. There was no need to marry. We could have conceived a child for the Corps - through artificial insemination, even. It's done every day. But you wanted to marry. Why?"</p><p>So the typical conversation would go something like this:</p><p>[The Corps tells two people they're high genetic matches, and suggests they consider marriage. They talk about it.]</p><p>          "No, we don't want to marry each other. We're not compatible like that."</p><p>          "Would you consider artificial insemination?"</p><p>          [more conversation]</p><p>Again, people can say yes or no, but if the genetic match is high enough, there's social pressure to say yes. That's just what's done. The assumption is that if the Corps is asking this of you, the match must be <em>exceptionally</em> high (as it was in the case of both Bester's arranged marriage and Talia's arranged marriage), so you'd need a good reason to say no, or else it's taken as being selfish. (A good reason might be, "I'm a Psi Cop and I just got assigned off-world and I can't deal with pregnancy right now." "Please consider this after your assignment.")</p><p>But remember, again I'm talking about <em>social pressure</em> - no one is dragging you out of bed and forcing you to do this. Do one is demoting you for not doing this. No one is firing you for not doing this. You may get some nagging, though.</p><p>And if you <em>volunteer</em>, you get some brownie points from the higher ups.</p><p>When it comes to genetic matching, there are three levels bureaucratically:</p>
<ul>
<li>Genetic match too low - match not approved</li>
<li>Genetic match moderate - match approved if parties request it</li>
<li>Genetic match exceptionally high - marriage or artificial insemination <em>recommended to parties</em>
</li>
</ul><p>And as I said, actual arranged <em>marriages</em> are less common than arranged <em>reproduction</em>, and generally have to do with more than just genetic matching - the elders in the lives of these young people think they would make a good pair (whether they're right about it or not).</p><p>No one is <em>forced</em>. But it is a major culture clash - people not raised in the Corps might be quite shocked to find their supervisors, or administrators of their school, suggesting who they should marry or who they should have a baby with. They might be outraged by what they might feel was an intrusion into their "private, personal life." Outside the Corps, such suggestions are not a boss' place, or a teacher's place. In the Corps, "the Corps is Mother and Father," and that's what elders <em>do</em>. It's their duty as elders.</p><p>This is where the cultural misunderstandings come from.</p><p>(And the only "later" we see in canon who "gets it" is Sandoval Bey, because he's Bey, the later who "out-Corps'd the Corps." Deadly Relations, p. 74-75: Bester, waking up in the hospital: "I'm lucky you found me. Thank you, sir, for saving my life." Bey: "Well, that is the function of the aged, Mr. Bester. Once we can no longer contribute to the race in a direct, genetic way, we keep our eyes on the young.")</p><p>The "intrusion" of elders in the relationships and reproductive lives of younger people leads to a culture clash. The Corps' interest in genetic matching is weird and foreign, and perhaps scary as well. The fact that the Corps is a government agency (even though it's also a lot more than that) scares many laters (and outsiders) even more. That's where all this THEY BREED PEOPLE LIKE PUPPIES! anti-Corps hysteria comes from.</p><p>Now, there also ways to circumvent this system. And no, I don't mean doing something crazy, illegal and dangerous like leaving the Corps. I mean how to work within the system to keep them off your back.</p><p>Most simply, people who want to avoid all this, for one reason or another, enter into approved (straight) marriages with friends (whether consummated or not), live together for a while, and separate. Guess what the Corps can do about it? Nothing. You're in the "straight marriage" database (more on this later), and they don't spend time and money trying to track down all these people and see how those marriages are going. The Corps might have the biggest budget of any EA agency, but their resources are not infinite. People who know you/work with you will probably know what you're doing, but they probably won't (or can't) do anything about it.</p><p>(There are other advantages to getting married - if you're a Psi Cop, for instance, you will live in the communal barracks until promotion (at least four years, usually five or six) unless you're married. If you're married, you and your spouse get your own apartment.)</p><p>In other cases, people whose marriages fail just simply don't divorce. This is what Bester and Alisha Ross did. They were married for less than a year. She cheated on him, and they split up. But they didn't divorce - he assumes she must have filed for divorce during or after the Telepath War (when it was socially very difficult to remain married to him), but before that, she didn't. And why? Because it made the paperwork easier.</p><p>If either one had filed for divorce, the Corps might try to match them up with someone else, for marriage or a child. If they stayed legally married - even if they hadn't seen each other in <em>thirty-five years</em> - the Corps wasn't going to do a thing about it. (And they didn't.) And these were two P12s! The Corps left them alone. So unless they really wanted to marry someone else, there was no reason to divorce.</p><p>Life in the Corps is life in a system. You learn the system, and you learn your way around the system (in both senses).</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. What About Same-Sex Marriages?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>But what about LGBT telepaths? They exist - what happens to them?</p><p>Good question!</p><p>First, same sex marriage is legal in the Earth Alliance.</p><p>Marcus and Franklin pretend to be married in <em>Rising Mars</em>:</p><p>"Most of the Resistance travel light, travel alone. So to get travel permits for the two of you together, well, our access to the Transit Bureau is limited to whatever we can steal. So you're Jim Fennerman and you're Daniel Lane. A young married couple on holiday to Mars for their honeymoon."</p><p>(A young couple who never got to go to Mars for their honeymoon, because the Mars Resistance stole their travel documents.)</p><p>Susan Ivanova and Talia Winters were also supposed to have an on-screen relationship, but this got pushed off-screen for various reasons.</p><p>So, how does the Corps treat same-sex marriages?</p><p>The marriage restrictions, recall, are Corps-side, not Earth Alliance law - these Corps restrictions were put in place so that telepaths (ideally) have children who are of equal or greater strength, and that is the basis for screening opposite-sex marriages. If a couple doesn't fit into this box - they're same-sex partners, if they're both infertile, etc. - then there's no real basis for the Corps to block their marriage, so these marriages would be approved at a much higher rate.</p><p>The story doesn't end there, however. The Corps still cares about making genetic matches and telepath babies. ^_^</p><p>So while the Corps isn't likely to prevent a same-sex couple from marrying, they might still request/suggest that one or both partners have children (via IVF) with suitable genetic matches.</p><p>Basically, from a bureaucratic standpoint, everyone who is in a straight marriage goes into one database in the system, and everyone else (same-sex marriage and unmarried) goes into the other database.</p>
<ul>
<li>If you're in the first database, whether you're trying for a baby or not, whether you're living together or separated, whatever your circumstances, the Corps won't ask you to have a child with a third party genetic match. You can <em>volunteer</em> to do so, and some people do, but they won't ask it of you. (Similar to how they can't ask someone to do more than four deathbed scans: there are internal limits on what the Corps can ask of someone.)</li>
<li>If you're in the second database, then at some point, if a high genetic match is found, and you're both in that database, then you may be asked. Not <em>forced</em> - no one is abducted in their beds and dragged off - but asked.</li>
</ul><p>So the conversation might go something like this:</p><p>          "We see you're unmarried. We've found a woman who's a high genetic match with you. Would you consider marriage?"</p><p>          "I'm gay."</p><p>          "Oh, OK." [talks it over with woman] "She's open to artificial insemination. Would you consider donating a sperm sample?"</p><p>The woman, obviously, can also say "no" to having his baby.</p><p>
  <strong>When it comes to procreation, LGBT telepaths (who are not married to partners with whom they can produce children) would be treated the same as all other similarly situated telepaths: they may be asked to have children artificially, or they may not.</strong>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. What About Transgender Telepaths?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Thanks to reader Maeve_McKinnon for bringing this up!</p><p>I want to write a longer story that deal with this, once I figure out how to make it work. In the meantime, I will say that the Corps (as an institution) doesn't care about the sex of the person you marry, or your own sex/gender, either. The wrinkles come up only around reproduction.</p>
<ul>
<li>If someone was unmarried and had no children already, the Corps might ask for sperm/eggs first.</li>
</ul><p>For sperm donation, I don't see why it would be treated any differently than the (very common) case of cis men donating sperm and then not marrying/not remarrying. (See for instance, Sandoval Bey, who implies he has done exactly this, and never even met the children.) The only difficulty here would be whether someone would be allowed to block male puberty and transition younger - not because they have anything ideologically against LGBT people, but because then you couldn't have biological children. Canon obviously never gets into one of these cases, but that would be the issue for some people (because of family lineages, because people want to try for children who are stronger than they are, etc.).</p><p>But I don't mean it's an absolute ban - there are plenty of unmarried telepaths who don't have children (see, for instance, both Talia and Lyta - Lyta was never married, and Talia had her short marriage annulled, and canon makes no mention at all of the Corps ever trying to get them remarried or either of them ever having children). John Matheson in Crusade is another example - unmarried, no children. So is Byron Gordon! And Bester's lover never lives to give birth, so I think that means we never meet a single telepath in the show who has had children. <strong><em>Not one.</em></strong></p><p>There is no "rule" that all telepaths must be "forced" to have children, or even that all unmarried telepaths be "forced" to have children, or that anyone be "forced" to marry to have children. It's a social matter - and with such things, YMMV - not rules or regulations. It's <em>far worse</em> to have a telepath child commit suicide than for that child not to have children him/herself.</p><p>Again, as I've said like, everywhere, the Corps is made up of <em>people</em>; it's not some monolithic faceless bureaucracy controlling people's lives. There is no "one way" these aspects of people's lives play out.</p><p>For egg donation, there is the additional wrinkle of who would carry the child - but that's not insurmountable, because I'm sure somewhere in the Corps there are women who would be willing to bear additional children to help other telepaths out (especially Corps-raised women, because they would have been raised to very strongly see the Corps as a family). Remember, this is a culture where it is <strong><em>very common</em></strong> for cis women to undergo IVF and carry the child of someone they barely know.</p><p>This would be a lot more obvious if we had canon books written from the POV of telepath women, and if the show didn't focus on life on a space station, where no one has children - normals or telepaths - because everyone's living on this space station (spinning in circles, around and around, till they think they're standing still, and the entire universe revolves around them).</p><p>OK, we're not there yet. ^_^</p><p>And that's where it all lands - freezing/donating eggs is a <em>pain in the ass</em> (I've been there, done that IRL), but it's just one's <em>duty</em>, and that's it. If you want to do that because you go on dangerous missions and might not survive, OK. If you want to do that because you want to transition, OK. No one is ever going to link this to cultural notions of "motherhood" (which I guess is also weird for normals, who expect no connection to "fatherhood" in sperm donation, but think of egg freezing differently).</p><p>The usual conflicts between the expectations of "laters" and those of Corps-raised telepaths is the larger issue - laters are generally heartbroken at not being able to raise their own children beyond the age of five (and usually three), while to Corps-raised telepaths, this unusual system is their "normal" (in the sense of "regular" and "ordinary" and "how it should be," not "normals"!).</p>
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